Kitabı oku: «You», sayfa 7

NESSI

Above you hangs the night, below you lies the darkness, and you’re floating between the two and hear your girls calling to you. You imagine it’ll be like this forever. Just floating and not worrying about anything and forgetting that there’s a child growing in you. I could let go and sink, you think and realize it’s nonsense. You’ve never had a high opinion of people who killed themselves because they couldn’t take on life. In books, in movies, in life. But who knows what you’ll think in ten years; who knows what you’ll think when you’re lying in a bed somewhere sick and full of pain or when your heart is broken and the world seems as dark as the lake below you and the night above you. Who knows.

You turn in the water and only now do you feel the full weight of your wet clothes dragging you down. In no particular hurry, you move your arms and swim back to shore.

The boys think it’s sexy, they say you should do it more often. You grin, you have humor, your teeth are chattering. The world is full of idiots, and you’re one of them. Your clothes lie drying on the grass, Ruth has given you her jacket. You’re sitting by the fire, your knees against your chest, your eyes closed. Schnappi said her heart nearly stopped when she saw you in the water, but as her heart stops every time a good-looking guy walks by, that doesn’t mean much. What’s much more noticeable is that Schnappi’s avoiding your eye. You don’t need to ask. Your girls know you’re pregnant. Schnappi’s never been good at keeping secrets.

“Are you cold?” asks Stink.

You shake your head and feel as if you’re six years old again and sitting by the fire with your parents after a long hike, so terribly tired and so terribly excited at being allowed to stay up so late with the grown-ups. Stink puts an arm around you. The boys talk on and on. You are all patient, as girls are only patient when they want to get rid of boys. You are looking into the flames, you are barely talking. One after the other the boys say goodbye. Eric mumbles: Maybe we’ll meet up later in the bar. And then you’re alone at last.

“What did you do that for?” asks Ruth, as if you’d just got out of the water.

“I don’t know, it just felt right.”

“And if we’d been standing in the station, would you have jumped onto the rails?”

“Come on. I wasn’t planning on killing myself.”

They all nod, they hoped you were going to say this.

“Let’s all keep our mouths shut,” says Stink, before Ruth can tear into you again. “If Nessi doesn’t want to talk about it, then how about we don’t talk about it?”

Everyone looks at you, it’s your turn, the ball’s in your court, you say, “Girls, I’m pregnant, and I don’t want to talk about it now.”

They nod again, it’s accepted, and you’re so relieved that you want to talk about it right now, but at the same time you’re exhausted by the day and just want to sleep. Schnappi reads your thoughts and says that’s enough for today. She offers to drive you home.

Ruth hugs you and tells you to keep the jacket. Stink strokes your back and kisses you firmly on the mouth. It’s never been so hard to say goodbye to your friends. You get into your wet jeans. Schnappi takes you by the hand and you walk to her bike. When you’ve cycled two blocks she brakes, turns around to you, and swears she hasn’t told a soul.

“They guessed, Nessi, they really guessed.”

“You swear?”

“I swear.”

“Thanks.”

Schnappi cycles on, you rest your head against her back and shut your eyes.

It’s just after midnight when you creep into the apartment. Your parents are asleep, any sound would give you away, so you take off your running shoes and walk down the corridor to the bathroom in your wet socks. You close the door gently behind you and lean against it. It takes some minutes before you dare to turn on the light. Your face is pale, your clothes still wet and heavy. You could never have pulled this one off in the winter.

I went into the Lietzensee, you think and flip yourself the bird in the mirror.

In the shower the water’s so hot that you flinch for a moment, but you don’t change the temperature, you put up with the heat and wait until it’s passed through all the layers of cold to your innermost core and makes you glow.

You haven’t been as freezing as that for years.

By the time you leave the shower, the bathroom is a landscape swathed in fog.

You wipe the mirror clear and look at yourself.

Go closer.

You try to see a change. Nothing. You look down at yourself. Everything is as it should be. Breasts, belly, legs. As always. You make a fist and press it against your belly button. You’re furious. You’re so furious with yourself that you want to shove your fist through your stomach.

And then?

You don’t know what then.

But you have a clear vision of where it goes from here. You see your father shaking his head and calling you my little one. Your mother will burst into tears and get a bottle of white wine from the fridge. She won’t understand you. She’ll want to know how you imagine it will all be. On no account must you speak of abortion, bear that in mind. Abortion is taboo, because your mother had an abortion when she was nineteen and has never forgiven herself. The decision hurt both your parents. So no word about abortion, because then you might as well take a corkscrew and jab their eyes out. Your mother with her tears and quivering shoulders, your father leaning forward, hands open, as if to catch you. After the first glass of wine your father will say things will sort themselves out and there’s enough room in the apartment, which is already far too small, but you won’t point that out either. Your mother will hug you and promise to take care of everything, because she is your mother, after all, you should never forget that. She’ll also say she’s glad that you waited until after school, as if you planned to get pregnant. Then she’ll look at your father and say emotionally: I’m going to be a grandma!

Your parents won’t ask who the father is, because they’re scared of the answer.

That’s how it is, that’s how it always will be.

Fear.

And throughout all this your left hand would be clenched into a fist.

Over the next few weeks you’ll start getting fat. Not that you’re skinny now, but your mother looked like a whale when she was pregnant, so you’ll be exactly the same, she’s shown you the future. The months will pass, and the apprenticeship that Aunt Helga promised you will go to another girl. You’ll hardly see your girlfriends, because their lives are their lives and your life is your life and you can’t go in two directions at once. Every now and again Stink will call and you will start crying and Stink will cry too and after two hours your ears will be so hot from gossiping that you’ll hang up reluctantly. You’ll read everything about babies, weigh up the pros and cons of a home birth, and opt for the hospital. You’ll slowly come to terms with the situation. Your seventeenth birthday will be sad. Stink will drop in with Schnappi and stay for fourteen minutes. Ruth will phone in her greetings. And Taja? You’ll never hear a word from Taja, because still no one has any idea where she is. There will be no presents for you, just presents for the baby. Little socks. Little jackets. Toys. People will look at you askance in the supermarket and keep their distance. Everyone will know what kind of girl you are. Mother. Mom. Whale. And sometimes they will ask who the father is. And sometimes you will look at them and smile, as if that was an answer. You know you’re too young to be a mother. You’re too young to be anything at all. But life in reverse only works in the movies.

During the birth you will consist only of pain, and the pain will hollow you out and fill you with fire. Nothing bad can happen to me after this, you will think. And then the child. Red. Noisy. Yours. And everything will be fine.

And everything will be lovely.

It’s the last thing you want. You want to live without responsibilities or obligations, and without parents. You want to be someone who leads a life that is a mystery. Not the life of a girl named after a pop star. Not the life of the many girls who run around like emotional building sites and get pregnant and accept it because they’re just too idiotic to go a different way.

Not one of many, no.

But who knows whether you might not be better off like this after all. Take a look at Stink. Her mother ran off when Stink was still a baby, and after her father had decided that two children was too much work, he dumped Stink and her brother on Aunt Sissi and ran off to Argentina. Stink was nine at the time and until her twelfth birthday she thought her dad was coming back for Christmas. Stink’s brother saw through it all right away, of course. Whenever you ask Stink about it, she shakes her head and says she couldn’t care less. But you know that’s not true. It is like an invisible itch that no amount of scratching helps. A mixture of hatred and resignation. You on the other hand love your parents, but you don’t want them around, there’s no getting past that.

You give a start when the phone in your jacket pocket rings. You seriously went to sleep on the toilet, your hair is dry, and the toilet seat has left two impressions on the underside of your thighs. Your phone beeps twice, then it’s quiet. The text is so short that for a moment you think your phone has got bumped.

cm

Then you see who sent the text, and the thinking stops, your problems are your problems, this is more important. You run out of the bathroom into your room and get dressed. You put on a pair of worn-out running shoes, turn around and see your mother standing in the doorway.

“Vanessa, what’s going on?”

You push past her and run out of the apartment like someone who’s left herself outside and hopes to find herself again as quickly as possible, before it’s too late.

SCHNAPPI

She yells at you. She yells at you through the closed door as if you were a stranger, as if your life were worthless and she had the right to spit on it. In the background you hear your father mumbling. She ignores him and goes on yelling at you. One of the neighbors calls up the stairwell, telling her to shut up. You call down telling him to shut up himself.

A door slams.

It continues.

She calls you a whore. She calls you a bastard. You wait till she is out of breath, then press the doorbell, you press so hard that your thumb turns white, when the ringing suddenly stops. You laugh out loud. She’s seriously switched off the bell. You laugh until the tears come and the tears have nothing more to do with laughter. Your finger slips off the doorbell, you sit down on the doormat, your back against the door.

And I’m only three hours late, what’s three hours?

Some nights you slip into the apartment unnoticed, a few times your father sits waiting in the kitchen, he shakes his head and says he was worried. But he isn’t really bothered, he trusts you and calls you his little sunshine.

If it wasn’t for her …

Your mother must have left the key in the lock. You wouldn’t have credited her with so much imagination. She told you the houses in her village didn’t have any doors, because people trusted each other, and if someone stole something, the whole family was chased from the place. So that’s how things are back home. It’s a mystery to you how someone who grew up without doors could come up with the idea of leaving the key in the lock.

You’re so tired.

Now you’ll wait till she’s asleep, then your father will let you in. Wait for half an hour, an hour at most. The day rushes through your head like the subway train that you’ve been waiting for. You see Nessi in the water, you see yourselves in the cinema and you can taste the stale popcorn. You like looking back on the day. It’s a bit like coming home late in the evening, turning on the television, and there’s a program on that shows only you, going through life, all your mistakes, all your heroic deeds. You want to tell your father about the movie. He likes Denzel Washington. But how surprised will your father be when he opens the door in twenty minutes and sees that you’ve disappeared? And how surprised will you be in retrospect that your life has taken a new turn in a few seconds, and dragged you thousands of miles away from Berlin?

Anything is possible. And it all begins with two short beeps.

You’re sitting in the dark corridor, because you don’t feel like pressing the light switch over and over again. You sit there in the darkness, and there are two beeps. You take your phone out of your jacket and read the text on the blue display and react the way you all react to this message tonight.

You run.

RUTH

You get the message at the same time. You’re lying next to Eric again and your ears are tingling. You were spared the sex this time. You’re both too drunk. Your parents think you’re sleeping over at Stink’s. It’s one lie more or less. You have very different problems, because you couldn’t leave it alone. Four cocktails in the little bar on Savignyplatz, where you only get served because one of the waitresses is Eric’s sister. Schnappi and Stink stopped after the second cocktail, only you couldn’t stop yourself. Now you’re lying beside Eric. In your defense, it would have to be said that there was no real chance of going home in this state. Your mother would have bitten your head off and your father would have pogoed on your corpse.

The mattress is on the floor and smells slightly of mold, and there’s also the acrid smell of a sweaty boy who sprays himself with too much perfume—things you won’t miss. You won’t miss the hand on your shoulder either.

“Go away!”

Eric persists. He shakes you as if you were a fruit machine that had swallowed his last euro. You groan, you could puke, you could just lean out of bed and puke. But you don’t. You’ve still got a bit of self-respect. So you open your eyes, and as if by magic your ears open too.

“… light is driving me mad. Really mad. How do you turn this little fucker off? Tell me how to turn this fucker off.”

“What?”

Eric holds up a green star in front of your eyes, going light and then dark again. You feel spittle dribbling from the corner of your mouth and wipe it away.

“Please,” says Eric.

You recognize your phone. You love that glow, it pulses like a light under water, you set it that way on purpose.

“Take it away,” you say.

“Turn it off, Ruth.”

“Put it under the pillow and let me sleep!”

Eric pulls the covers away.

“The fucker is vibrating and lighting up. Turn it off!”

You would like to strangle him. Too dumb to turn off a phone, you think, and grab it from him. You look at the message that’s just come in and see double and then triple and then double again. You rub your eyes and look again. Your thumb taps in your PIN and the phone stops lighting up. Eric sighs with relief, but his happiness lasts only a few seconds.

“Shit, what are you doing now?”

You pick up your clothes from the floor and are about to clear out when you realize that you’re far too drunk to negotiate a zebra crossing. You look back at the bed. Eric has his arm over his eyes. No, you can’t rely on him.

Maybe it was just an illusion, you think, maybe I’ll turn my phone back on and there’ll be nothing there.

You go into the bathroom, drape yourself over the toilet bowl, and stick your finger down your throat. After that you feel better. You slap water in your face and rummage in your purse. Five euros. That’s never going to be enough. You go back into your room. Eric is asleep, his arm still over his eyes. You take his wallet out of his trousers. Nothing, just a few coins. You drop the wallet, take a deep breath, and look at your phone again.

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You knew it wasn’t an illusion. Phones don’t lie. You pull on your boots, and then you run.

STINK

Of course there’s an idiot in every story. Someone who does everything wrong, backs the wrong horse and gets caught in the rain. Someone like you, disappearing on a stolen Vespa and grinning to themselves as if they’d won the jackpot. You’re the idiot, you’re the marked card. At the same time you’re the only one lying contentedly in her bed tonight. Your head is heavy from those two cocktails, the barkeeper probably slipped something into your glass. You hate it when guys flirt and then get nasty when you slap them down. If you said yes to every barman, you’d have died of alcohol poisoning years ago.

Eventually sleep overwhelms you and you dream of Neil going down on one knee in front of you in the disco and saying he isn’t bothered by your flowery underwear. You also dream of Nessi, bobbing away like a water lily and disappearing into the distance, even though you call her name. It’s a good thing you have a brother, otherwise you’d probably have slept through the rest of this story.

“Get up!”

The light goes on and off, on and off.

“Are you deaf or something? Get up!”

You wish you were deaf or something. You roll over. Your brother won’t let go.

“One of your stupid girlfriends has been ringing up a storm, how can’t you hear it?”

That’s enough. You kick the covers away, bickering like a washerwoman. You swing your legs out of bed and a whole universe of stars explodes in front of your eyes. You feel dizzy and you bend down and look at your toes until the explosions subside. You didn’t hear any ringing. Good thing your aunt’s on night shift tonight.

“God, Paul, I didn’t hear it ring,” you murmur.

“Yeah, right.”

Your brother slams the door behind him, you sink back.

Maybe it’s all just a dream? Maybe I can just go back to sleep—

Your bedroom door flies open again.

You raise your head.

Ruth is standing there, and she says, “I hate it when you don’t charge your battery.”

And as she says it you know something has happened.

Something bad.

The clock by the door says ten past three.

Whatever it is, it’s definitely bad.

The realization reaches your brain like a shock wave, your ears pop, you have to rub your nose because it’s suddenly itchy.

“My goodness,” you say, like a grandma whose shopping bag tears on the way home, then you totter to your feet and get dressed while Ruth tells you about the message she got.

Five minutes later you’re sitting on the stolen Vespa, your hair blowing in the wind, Berlin is in a coma, the streets are deserted and the traffic lights have a weary pulse that looks a bit like slow-motion Christmas lights. How you hate Christmas, how you love the city at night.

III

drives up to the next seat and onto the roots

drinking up the village

Portugal. The Man THE DEVIL

THE TRAVELER

And then you disappeared.

Without a trace.

And chaos was left in your wake.

The special crimes unit has been searching tirelessly for you. They said you wanted to be caught after they found your blood on the corpses. They said you were losing your concentration. They were now as familiar with your DNA as they were with your fingerprints.

Did that worry you? Were you even aware of it?

You were aware of it, the way you’re aware of things because people are talking about them. They said the Traveler was getting careless, and would soon fall into the special unit’s clutches. It didn’t occur to anyone that the Traveler didn’t care what he left behind. You were moving forward. The past remained behind like the vague memory of a dream or a smell that gets blown away by the next breeze. Not that you woke up drenched in sweat and wondered what had happened. Things like that are stupid. That’s what psychopaths do. The past was behind you, it wasn’t pursuing you.

You’re like a shark that always has to keep moving or it’ll sink. In a flowing forward motion. There is no going back. And just as a shark has no swim bladder, you have no morals. If you hesitated, you would sink to the bottom of our society in an instant and disappear.

Stasis is corruption, so you stay in calm motion.

For six years no one heard a thing from you. On the internet they wondered if the Traveler had reached his destination. You’re responsible for over sixty corpses. All inquiries have led nowhere, no one saw anything, the investigations washed out and the special unit was called into question. There was no pattern and no connection between the victims, there was no apparent motive. Even though the special unit would never have admitted it, they were waiting for your next step. They wanted mistakes. They looked at psychograms of serial killers, studied the behavior of frenzied attackers, and tried to force you into a category. They really had no idea who they were dealing with.

In 1998 you were offered a better job and moved to a bigger city. Your son turned seven and wrote his first letter, asking you if you couldn’t have him for the summer. You wrote back to say it was a good idea, he should ask Mom. Mom said no. Life took its course.

Your girlfriend split up with you because the long-distance relationship was too uncomfortable. You started spending your evenings in theaters and at concerts. You started reading more books, and built up a collection of documentaries on DVD. You discovered culture and met a woman who shared your passion for architecture. Otherwise hardly anything in your life changed. You weren’t calmer, you didn’t drink to excess or call your existence into question. Your friends didn’t notice any changes either. You were balanced. You traveled a lot throughout those years. Sometimes as a couple or in a group or on your own. And you never left any corpses behind.

When the new millennium was ushered in, your name was a legend. Someone wrote a book about you, someone put up a website that not only offered a forum for discussion but listed all your victims and was regularly checked by the special unit with the agreement of the provider. And of course someone tried to copy you and was promptly overpowered by his first victim. The day the two passenger planes flew into the World Trade Center, people started forgetting about you. The world was heading toward a new chaos. You grieved with the Americans, spent that afternoon in front of the television, and then got on with your life like the rest of us.

Year after year after year.

It was once again winter when you traveled across the country with a lot of snow and a storm at your heels. The papers said: The Avenging Angel strikes again.

Avenging what, is the question.

You keep quiet.

It is November.

It is 2003.

It is night.

Fennried is a tiny village on the river Havel between Ketzin and Brandenburg, so insignificant that there’s no phone booth and no public mailbox there. A main street and a side street, thirty-eight houses, eight run-down farms, two cigarette machines. The bus stop is by the entrance to the village, a van parks outside the bakery twice a week, and once a week a van selling frozen food drives through the streets and honks its horn. It seems like the village is all the time asleep, the tallest building is a dilapidated church with a little cemetery, in which the gravestones have either fallen over or lean wearily against one another. In the run-up to elections the parties don’t bother to put up posters along the two streets. It’s an in-between place. It doesn’t get bigger, it doesn’t get smaller, it stagnates in its insignificance.

One of your fans wrote that the challenge was so great that you couldn’t resist it. He wrote that after lengthy planning you had finally decided to pay Fennried a visit. He made a sketch of your journey through the town, as if he’d prearranged it with you, and published the sketch on his blog. He spent four days in custody for that. He knew too much. The special unit let him go when they found out that he’d got the details from a policeman who’d been part of the investigation in Fennried.

It’s Thursday. After work you get into the car and drive toward Berlin. You had a premonition this time. Like a scratch in your throat. After you woke up you drank coffee and sensed the change. As if the wind had turned. You spent the day in the usual rhythm, you’d even gone jogging for an hour after work, and it was only then that you set off.

Just before Berlin you leave the highway and stop at a gas station. You eat a baguette with smoked salmon standing at a table and talk to the cashier. You learn that her husband doesn’t want to see the children anymore, and that fourteen years after the wall came down hardly anything has gotten better and lots of things have gotten worse. But the cashier smiles when she says that. You like her optimism. She gives you an openness that she hopes will be reciprocated. You smile back and then you laugh together and you drive on.

Only when you’ve passed Fennried do you realize how small the village is. You turn around and drive back. One minute twenty-six seconds from one end to the other. Half the streetlights don’t work. It’s nine in the evening and almost all the windows are in darkness. The light of a television flickers here and there.

You drive through the village a third time. The wind tries to push your car off the road. You lower the driver’s window and enjoy the cold. You stop by a derelict farm and wait. A strange car in a tiny village on a desolate winter’s day. The snow starts enfolding you. The lights in the windows go out. It’s a bit like that night when you were stuck in the traffic jam. Calm. Solitude. And it reminds you a little of the silence of the motel. Both times you surprised yourself. You knew your potential, but be honest, you didn’t know what you were really capable of. Your new knowledge gives you a feeling of certainty now. As if a racing car knew its own strength.

Shortly after one o’clock you get out of the car and walk up to the first house.

What are you looking for? What makes you kill? Is there a medical background to it? A tumor, perhaps, pressing against your cerebral lobe? A sickness that makes you bare your teeth? Did you learn it from somebody? Did somebody take you by the hand and show you that killing is liberating? Is it liberating? Is that why you’re on the road? Are you looking for salvation, purification, absolution? Is it instinct? Is it desire?

Even though the shutters are down over all the windows and terraces, most of the doors are unlocked. You go from house to house. You ring the doorbell if necessary. Sometimes a dog barks at you, and sometimes there’s a chain on the door. You’re always polite and friendly. They let you in, you kill them quickly and efficiently. Most of the people who live here are pensioners. You happen upon two women under fifty. One is a nurse, the other a retired doctor. The doctor’s bell is surrounded by dried flowers and her door is the only one that opens at the first ring.

A village, thirty-eight houses, fifty-nine inhabitants.

You don’t leave a single soul alive.